Oracle BPA Suite – Tips & Tricks regarding usability

This week I attended the SOA Forum in Lisbon for which Oracle had organized 2 days regarding overall presentations and case studies and then 2 days of expert camps.These expert camps where divided in Advanced SOA and Oracle BPA Suite.

I suscribed for the BPA-one because I’m interested in the full development life cycle that is offered now, starting from analysis until development.

The Bpel Blueprint that got my attention, especially the ability to forward-engineer changes from BPA into your BPEL and vice versa.

The BPA-workshop started from scratch and gave us, the attendees, the possibility to get in toch with the different features within BPA as well for analysts as for developers through the usage of BPEL Blueprints.

The tips & tricks that can be of use for anyone interested in getting started with BPA, are the most important part to remember. The rest is basic workshop/tutorial stuff top get acquanted with the tool/environment.Tips & Tricks:

Installation-possibilities: When you want to install BPA you have different options depending on your requirements. If you just want to get acquanted with the tool and don’t want to start using the tool for production purposes you can use the following set-up: Architect + local repository (Oracle Lite or Oracle DB). If you want to get acquanted and use the tool for real implementations, use the following set-up: Architect + Repository Server. If you want to use your existing installation of Oracle XE or Oracle DB you can install Architect with a local repository pointing to XE or your DB => make sure you’re using the UTF8-character set, otherwise you will need to install a separate database instance

You can run BPA as a Java Application or an Applet

You need to use the same version for your bpa suite and your IDE, e.g. BPA 10.1.3.3 and Jdeveloper 10.1.3.X, and SOA Suite 10.1.3.x

You can only add access rights on group-level in Business Architect, not on model- or object-level => in other words, you need to organize the folders properly

When your working within Business Architect and with models and objects you need to keep in mind you’re working in an object-oriented fashion, meaning= when an object is displayed on multiple models, you are referring to object occurences, not to the object itself. Each object occurence can have its own specified properties, independend from the other object occurrences

You can’t integrate Business Rules in the release 10.1.3.3 of BPA Suite

Swimlanes and pools aren’t generated into the BPEL Blue print, these aren’t part of the generation functionality

Hopefully these tips & tricks, comments can help you in your first steps using BPA Suite.

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2 thoughts on “Oracle BPA Suite – Tips & Tricks regarding usability”

Hi Nathalie,Just one minor correction: You can “integrate” Business Rules in the release 10.1.3.3 of BPA Suite. What you can’t do in 10.1.3.3 is author the rules in the architect application.Best,Hugo Brand